Summary

This chapter introduced deadline management as the counterpoint to appointment or schedule management.

There are three major obstacles to meeting deadlines:

• Parkinson's Law or the tendency for work to expand so as to fill the time available for its completion

• Procrastination and Student's Syndrome, or the tendency to delay working on a task (procrastination is open ended, Student's Syndrome leads to a last-minute effort to get the task completed in time)

• Murphy's Law, or the tendency for things to go wrong

By addressing these obstacles, we have a greater probability of meeting deadlines.

We saw two strategies for combating Parkinson's Law and the delaying tendencies, and one to mitigate Murphy's Law.

The first strategy was frontend load or doing as much of the task as possible up front. The thrust is to get the most difficult, most critical, and riskiest parts of the tasks out of the way so as to smooth the way for the rest of the task.

The second strategy was to set artificial deadlines...